Just upgraded my Airfoil to version 3.0

Some quite nice enhancements - it will now find not just your stand-alone Airport Express units and stream to those, but will also stream to computers. Which means that if you have loudspeakers attached to your computers then you can activate those, as well, if you want to have multi-room playback.

Airfoil Speakers is a free add-on that identifies stand-alone units and runs in the background.

Can't guarantee that the playback is digitally bit transparent, but I think that if you do not activate the Effects (same as Equalizer in iTunes) then you get true streams.

Airfoil 3.0 also has video streaming from one computer to another ... 

The upgrade cost USD 10 for previous Airfoil owners. Otherwise USD 25.

Airfoil is also available for WIndows.

Airfoil makes it possible to hijack other applications, such as your browser, realplayer, etc -- which receives sound/music from the internet. For instance, I'm now listening to This Week's Broadcast from the NY Philharmonic, accessible over the net. It is streamed to RealPlayer, and I am sending that sound from my computer to my Beolab 5000 through the Airport Express. (Sounds complicated, but it isn't - and it is very handy.) 

I can also hijack my iTunes on the Mac mini (or other Mac), and send its music to a variety of outlets around the house. Since I then control iTunes through my iPod Touch I now have a way of getting multiroom playback using Remote Buddy.

http://rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/ 

 

NY Philharmonic stream page: http://nyphil.org/attend/broadcasts/index.cfm?page=broadcastsByMonth 

Well, i got to the second paragraph and you lost me - but it sounds amazing!

Once i move house, i will be turning it into a linked-up-techno-palace and will be straight on to you for lots of advice!!  Thank you for sharing your experiences with us, i do know plenty of people really appreciate your input!

Lee

 

It would be nice if Apple allowed addons for the AppleTV. Being able to stream to the aTV just like an AirportExpress would be great...

9 LEE:

Well, i got to the second paragraph and you lost me - but it sounds amazing!

Once i move house, i will be turning it into a linked-up-techno-palace and will be straight on to you for lots of advice!!  Thank you for sharing your experiences with us, i do know plenty of people really appreciate your input!

Lee

 

Hi Lee,

Think of Airfoil as a junction box that allows you to send whatever sound your computer is making to your various outlets in the house, via Wi-Fi.

iTunes does this easily, as it connects to Airtunes and is then transmitted to your Airport Express units. But sometimes you are listening to music from other applications: a browser, RealPlayer, QuickTime, VLC, and many others.

Airfoil hijacks the sound output from these, and lets you send it wherever you want to. Previously only to Airport Express units, but now also to stand-alone Macs that are on your Wi-Fi net. 

And if you're controlling music playback through iTunes, to speakers in your home, Airfoil now makes multi-room playback a lot easier. 

 

@ soundproof 

I've been using Airfoil for quite a while now and it is a very useful, little application. I use version 2.0.8 and everytime I open it I get prompted to ugrade to Airfoil 3. I find it a little cheeky that I have to pay to upgrade and I can't remove the prompt if I don't want to upgrade. After all, I've already paid for the program once.

However, Airfoil 2 has about 1.5 seconds delay which limits my use of it. If version 3 has no delay I would think about upgrading even though I have to pay an additional fee.

Would you say it is worth it?

Cheers,
Ben 

OK, so I bought the upgrade even though I was reluctant to do so. Disappointingly, The delay issue has not been fixed so that was $10 spent for next to nothing

How do you notice this delay? and why is it important? do you pipe the video and audio and thereby having an audio lag cause sound and video to be out sync ... or?

(I don't have airfoil, but was thinking of investing)

Christian 

Unfortunately there is no way of stopping the lag, it's the nature of the way it works...

The only truly 'lag free' wireless system I'm aware of is the BeoLink Wireless...

I have a pair of Lacie laptop speakers which actually sound decent and I often use them with my iBook. If I want to pipe music from iTunes to my BS6500 through an Airport extreme it is no problem as there is no audible lag. Problem is when I use Airfoil to hijack audio from another application, say Firefox, then the Airport sound comes 1.5 seconds later than the laptop sound.

I often explore Myspace for interesting music and being Danish living in Norway I listen to Danish radio over the internet. When doing so I will have to either listen through the BS6500 or the laptop speakers.

If this was a contest in sound quality, needless to say, the 6500 would easily wipe out the Lacie speakers. What annoys me is I can't use both at the same time so I don't really feel any improvement from the last version of Airfoil (at least not for my use).

All this said, I still think Airfoil is a great application but I think it should be possible to fix the delay issue.

The only way they could do it would be to delay the sound coming from your laptop's speakers too.

What radio station is it you're talking about? It's possible that you could actually listen through iTunes, as long as you can find the URL of the MP3 stream...

Thing is, iTunes has no delay on Airport but Airfoil does so I'm positive the delay is an Airfoil issue.

Mostly, I listen to Danish P3. Unfortunately it is not available on iTunes.
 

Doesn't the radio's webpage contain an address ( you just go to iTunes > Advanced > Open Stream... ) or a file to download? Most radios have this ( it's usually a .pls or .m3u file ).

benkap:

Thing is, iTunes has no delay on Airport but Airfoil does so I'm positive the delay is an Airfoil issue.

Mostly, I listen to Danish P3. Unfortunately it is not available on iTunes.
 

iTunes does have a delay with the AirPort, it's just that when you pause tracks, it hides the delay by sending an 'extra quick' message to the AirPort telling it to stop audio straight away. It still takes about a second or so for iTunes to encode the audio into an essentially 'lossless' audio stream, send it to the AirPort and then for it to be decoded.

Hello,

The delay is due to the fact the airport express works on the Wifi network.   Datastream is buffered to prevent gaps.  That's why there's a delay between your PC speakers and the speakers attached to the AE (airport express).  That's also the reason why, when you play a DVD on your PC/mac and redirect the sound through airfoil to your AE, the sound on the AE is delayed.

The airfoil-guys were aware of this and in version 3 they solved the issue by a workaround: now you can drive several AE, your own PC-speakers and even the speakers of other PC's on the network by Airfoil, so they all have the same delay and all sound is in sync.  (Airtunes (iTunes + AE) uses the same trick, because iTunes drives the PC speakers and the AE-speakers.)

This didn't solved the problem with the DVD, so they added their own DVD player to Airfoil.  When you play your DVD or AVI or MOV... in this this player airfoil delays a bit the movie, so movie and sound are correctly timed.  This works quite nice.  Only the DVD part is still in beta and uses loads of CPU.  My Mac Mini Intel Duo can't cope with it.

So, airfoil is very useful for owners of an AE and worth its money.  Airfoil can send any sound of your computer to the AE and now with all sound and vision in sync.

The only critic is that apple should have implemented this functionality in Mac OS just from the start ... 

People who want to play with Airfoil, can download a trailversion on http://www.rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/

Kind regards

Joost